It is easy for the Cynical and Alienated Citizen to write off the Iowa caucuses as a wholly unrepresentative media circus which throws the balance of an election in the direction of a candidate chosen by an almost completely homogenous electorate—white, middle-class, middle-aged Midwesterners. While this argument is valid and disconcerting, it should not detract from the democratic aims of the caucus process itself or the grassroots participatory democracy it arouses.

Caucuses are a beautiful bastion of democracy. Neighbors, friends, people who know each other from the diner all get together in schools, barns and peoples’ houses. They pull up chairs in a circle and civilly discuss and debate who they like as a candidate and why. They help undecideds choose a candidate based on what that person is concerned about. They talk about things that are meaningful to them—jobs and unemployment, health care, their children’s education in the public schools. They want to make a difference. Then, a precinct captain goes around with a piece of paper, counts heads, does a little mental math and determines how many delegates a candidate gets. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

There is none of the isolating privacy of regular ballot-box elections. No hanging chads or miscounted votes tabulated in backrooms long after the Average Citizen has done her civic duty of punching a card or filling in a bubble. This is true citizen democracy, with folks determining who will best represent their community, their neighbors and their families. Caucuses bring national electoral politics to the local level and elicit that rare and spectacular quality of engaged citizens coming together in the electoral arena to make change.

One hundred and forty miles south of the Twin Cities on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day I find myself in Mason City, Iowa—home of The Music Man, Kum & Go gas stations and the Kerry campaign office for this region of the state. The office is somewhat less glorious than my imagination of an Iowa-caucus-day campaign office, the pace calculated and intense but not frenetic. Several Minnesotans have made their way down with me to campaign for their candidate on the day that, as the first caucus to select delegates for the Democratic nomination, sets the tone and tenor of the race for the presidency.

The day was filled with typical get-out-the-vote activities, keeping us busy with lit drops, phone calling and visibility on the one main drag of Mason City. It wasn’t until later in the evening, when I received the assignment to actually go to one of the precinct caucuses to rally support for Kerry, that I saw the beauty of the process. I traveled back up north in the waning winter light, and exited on a rural road that bumped past silos, empty fields and a wind farm with 30 or so imposing wind turbines slowly slicing through the night. Finally arriving in Lake Mills, Iowa (population 2,140), I went into the school where the caucus was being held. The convener, the epitome of a friendly, stout Midwesterner named Chuck McGrady, welcomed me graciously and told me I was welcome to put up signs and hand out stickers and flyers, especially, he said, considering who I was campaigning for—and took a Kerry sticker and put it on the lapel of his corduroy sports coat. The caucus-goers began to arrive, despite the competing high school basketball game. People came with their spouses or their 85-year-old mothers. The average age was about 65. Many of them were coming to a caucus for the very first time, incensed by the loss of jobs in their community, the effects of No Child Left Behind on their schools and the damage being done by corporate farming in their area. Several of them had voted Republican all their lives, but resolutely told the convener they’d have to switch their registration.

After the reading of the appropriate statements, the caucus-goers were told to break into sub-caucuses for whichever candidate they were supporting. The convener designated different corners of the school library to be the gathering place for each candidate. Amazingly, there were no undecideds. After about 30 minutes of debate and discussion, the caucus math was tabulated and it was determined that Gephardt had received the most delegates, with Kerry and Edwards tied for second place. While this was not a typical result for Gephardt that night—he would drop out of the race after losing Iowa miserably—it seems that the folks in Lake Mills had met over pizza at a local restaurant and decided that Gephardt was the one who could fight for the rights of small farmers and union workers. The convener asked who would like to be a delegate to the state convention, and citizens—mothers, teachers, retirees and farmers—raised their hands to be the voices of their communities.

I would challenge any critic who says that this system is not representative democracy. It is the heart of participatory politics—it brings people together over common causes and values, allows them to choose a member of their community to represent them at the broader level and brings grassroots issues into the picture. The influence on the nomination process from the intense media scrutiny and analysis of the Iowa caucuses is surely unbalanced, but the caucus process is far removed from such political theatrics. It’s as close to front-porch politics as we get nowadays, and it’s a beautiful thing.